Would wordpress be good enough as a school website?

ColdAsIce

ColdAsIce

ColdAsIce

Soldato
Joined
26 May 2006
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Edinburgh
I have been asked to take over the current school website which has recently been updated but is still awful.

Personally I want everything changed as at the moment it is just terrible. The person used windows-live website creation tool to design it and also uses windows-live for hosting, which is terribly slow.

Almost everything loads up into a word document instead of being built into the actual site design and the whole thing is just a boring mess.

I am the I.T Tech for the school but have stayed well away from websites as my design skills were always terrible, have barely touched on coding either. However I would be willing to take on something like wordpress which I have heard is a good alternative to designing a full blown website.

These are the sections the site requires:

General news page
individual department sections
School Calender of events
Being able to display photo and possibly video from events

Do you guys think using wordpress would be able to this and not look to amateur?

Thanks for any advice/help.
 
If you can design a theme for wordpress it can look however you want it to.

Is this internal or external?
 
Sp00n said:
If you can design a theme for wordpress it can look however you want it to.

Is this internal or external?
Click to expand...

External.

I have been nominated to overtake the current website and agreed to updating it for the moment. Quite honestly the current design is so poor, I hate even the thought that my name will be attached to it. Sounds harsh as the other guy put a fair amount of effort in at short notice to get the current website in place, so he isn't fully to blame.
 
Do you have the time to invest or have they just asked you to do it as a side project?

Joomla can be pretty full on if you aren't familiar with code/design, wordpress is slightly easier but its more blog orientated.

In reality there are a million and one different CMS products out there but they will all require a fair bit of time to learn if you want it to look reasonable.
 
Sp00n said:
Do you have the time to invest or have they just asked you to do it as a side project?

Joomla can be pretty full on if you aren't familiar with code/design, wordpress is slightly easier but its more blog orientated.

In reality there are a million and one different CMS products out there but they will all require a fair bit of time to learn if you want it to look reasonable.
Click to expand...

There is a member of teaching management that has asked me to take it over, she speaks like it will be a 20 min thing a week to update but the whole website is so bad, I don't want to update the thing. We had a meeting last week as the guy who designed it is leaving for a new job, so with him in the meeting I didn't want to offend the guy about my true feelings on the website.

Now that I have been given full control, personally I want to see the whole site redesigned but she has no idea how much of an undertaking that really is!
 
ColdAsIce said:
There is a member of teaching management that has asked me to take it over, she speaks like it will be a 20 min thing a week to update but the whole website is so bad, I don't want to update the thing. We had a meeting last week as the guy who designed it is leaving for a new job, so with him in the meeting I didn't want to offend the guy about my true feelings on the website.

Now that I have been given full control, personally I want to see the whole site redesigned but she has no idea how much of an undertaking that really is!
Click to expand...

You need to make her aware it will take a fair amount of time, especially seeing as you have limited experience.

If you don't she will expect miracles from you and it will just create problems in the long run.
 
Sp00n said:
You need to make her aware it will take a fair amount of time, especially seeing as you have limited experience.

If you don't she will expect miracles from you and it will just create problems in the long run.
Click to expand...

This. Regardless of the budget it needs to be bought to the attention how time consuming the process is.
 
kenmare said:
This. Regardless of the budget it needs to be bought to the attention how time consuming the process is.
Click to expand...

I agree with both you guys, the meeting was only last Thursday and this week I have been left on my own as the Network manager is on holiday, so it's been a busy week. What I will do is arrange a meeting with her and explain my feelings on the whole thing and how time consuming this will actually be.
 
ColdAsIce said:
Now that I have been given full control, personally I want to see the whole site redesigned but she has no idea how much of an undertaking that really is!
Click to expand...

Wordpress is a good idea, but the whole idea of a CMS is that once the site it's built anyone can do the updates.

You need to be looking at current systems (organisational system not your servers) and making sure that the appropriate people are making the updates instead of it all be dumped on you.
 
K.C. Leblanc said:
Wordpress is a good idea, but the whole idea of a CMS is that once the site it's built anyone can do the updates.

You need to be looking at current systems (organisational system not your servers) and making sure that the appropriate people are making the updates instead of it all be dumped on you.
Click to expand...

I am looking at joomla at the moment and going through the process of installing it on a local webserver being my PC. Like you say if it is a properly managed CMS then individual departments can make their own updates to the site with ease, instead of everything being thrown on me.
 
Just an opinion, but I recently had to make a CMS decision for one of our corporate sites and went with Wordpress. I found Joomla, from a developer and content editor perspective, to be severely convoluted. I am sure with time it is extremely powerful and capable, but Wordpress 3 is built in a way I instantly understood both the code and back end.
 
Sp00n said:
Ah, no, they are essentially the same thing, wasn't sure if you had found anything :)
Click to expand...

The install guide uses xampp so just downloaded that instead :D thanks

still undecided between joomla and wordpress, there is a nice guide for schools that someone linked me to which uses joomla, I don't know if the same exists for wordpress.
 
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